


Candy

by von_gikkingen



Category: Black Panther (2018), Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Coincidences, Magic, Magical Accidents, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-07-23 16:23:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20011291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/von_gikkingen/pseuds/von_gikkingen
Summary: She knows all her memories are still there, just under the surface. And all she needs is the right trigger...





	Candy

She has to get in danger. She knows that's the only way. Only then will the suppressed memories come to the surface to tell her where to find safety.

A house. She’s certain she’s looking for a house. An old place full of strange artifacts and view that sometimes seems to be of the streets of Hong Kong and sometimes the streets of New York and… most often of all the streets of this city. The city she’s been wandering through for two days now, looking, without success, for that mysterious place where she knew she belonged.

Where they _needed her_.

That’s why she had to find it. Not because she was lost but because they needed every soldier they had. There were terrible things just beyond what ordinary people could see and there were so few of them holding them back. Protecting the… the…

But the word escapes her.

Everything escapes her. What brief glimpses into her past she gets don’t really offer any guidance. She needs an address, not a memory of a woman in yellow robes with a kind smile and eyes that seem unbelievably old and…

 _Sparks_. She remembers vivid orange sparks and every time she does her hands twitch, muscle memory taking over. But she has no idea why she feels the need to describe a circle in the air, over and over.

It makes about as much sense as anything else, which is not at all. She has no answer for the tunics she’s wearing or the strange objects in her pockets or the scars she knows hide under her clothes.

She has no answers – but she _is_ going to get them. All she has to do is get herself in danger. And judging by the sounds coming from the basement of this derelict building in the less-than-perfectly-safe part of London she _knows_ – that is what she found.

But she doesn’t even have to cross the threshold to feel a very real fear seizing her. Because the man she just collided with in her hurry to get inside…? The darkness in his eyes tells her she found it.

 _Danger_.

It’s the color of her skin that he minds to begin with. That’s what makes the suspicion with edge of violence come into his face. And it happens so fast she at first doesn’t notice that he’s only using one hand to push her against the wall because the other appears to be artificial and… “You people never quit, do you?” he says as his eyes are very dark as he looks at her and…

And then, for reasons she can’t begin to explain, he takes her lower lip and peels it back. And seems to be looking for something, strange as it seems. Letting go when he doesn’t find it.

“Or maybe I’m just paranoid…” he says and just like that the air of violence between them dissipates. And he’s just looking at her with a kind of _my bad_ expression that leaves her gaping at him.

“What just happened?” she finds herself saying.

“I may have mistaken you for an assassin. In my defense, the last few they sent looked a lot like…” he says and just gestures at her.

 _Black_ is what he means and doesn’t say and really doesn't need to spell out for her because it's so obvious. And she feels like there is no good answer to that so she doesn’t make one.

“But you’re something else, aren’t you?” he says then, commenting on the strange clothes she’s wearing.

And she _is_ something else. She can remember now. There is a word for what she is and there is a Sanctum in this city where they’ll be really worried about their missing sorceress by now and…

“Candy?” says the man, that man with the horrible, dark eyes and a scorpion tattoo on his forearm and…

And it sounds like the closest thing to an apology she’s going to get for what just happened. For that violent overreaction that had everything to do with the color of her skin. It’s a peace offering, that piece of candy he just handed her. And since this moment can hardly get any weirder she does end up unwrapping it and popping it into her mouth before walking away.

“Taking candy from strangers,” she mutters under her breath later, a few streets on, with the last of the sweetness melting on her tongue. “Somehow the least dangerous thing I did all week…”

Then, remembering that she doesn’t have to walk the whole way, not really, she does the thing she could almost remember herself capable of doing ever since she emerged from the mirror dimension, battered and missing quite a lot of her memory. She focuses and makes a circle in the air with her fingers and the space before her explodes in vivid orange light.

…

“Are you okay…?”

She forces herself to look away from the screen. Makes herself face one of her fellow masters of the mystic arts who clearly can’t ignore the look of incomprehension bordering on horror on her face as she listens to the report on the robbery that happened earlier today.

“I met him,” she says, eventually, when she can make herself speak.

Because there’s no doubt in her mind that the man news identify as one of the suspects is the same one she met the night she was wandering around trying to collect enough pieces of herself to be able to find the way back home.

“You did?”

“Yeah,” she laughs weakly as the screen tells her the exact number of the museum employees that were killed. “He gave me candy…”

**Author's Note:**

> Magic in the MCU always felt so... tagged on to me. The way it and just stays out of the way until plot calls for it to suddenly be a thing. Kinda weakening the worldbuilding. In a properly realized world everything should have the potential to come in contact, even if only accidentally. Anyway... tried to make that happen... It might not be 100% plausible, but.... yeah, I tried.


End file.
